Elastic Truth

By Kevin Green

In a world where threats to our well-being thrive, and responses to them increasingly take on extreme forms, how are we supposed to recognise truth from lies? What constitutes legitimate, or morally acceptable behaviour, when it comes to protecting ourselves from real or planned attacks?

Here, we survey the ways that truth and lies are increasingly entwined and legitimised to support behaviour that is unjustifiable, from disaffected parties to Nation States, and all their legal and wordsmithing employees.

We look at the work and wisdom of a globally respected, experienced and well-connected man who has spent decades working at the cutting-edge of eliciting truth from lies in pragmatic and successful ways.

We conclude with a return to some humane principles and understanding about how to move forwards in today’s often confused and aggressive climate, by respecting tried and tested practices.

We welcome morally acceptable challenges from dissenters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789554519

Kevin Green

Kevin Green is the founding Pastor of Living Stone Church in Barryton, Michigan. He has been involved in church planting and discipleship ministry for over fifteen years. Kevin earned a Th.M. in Pastoral Leadership from Dallas Theological Seminary. He is married to Elissa, and they have two children, Margaret and Zachary.

Book preview

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Introduction

Many years ago, I met a rising Army Intelligence Officer who was looking to marry a friend of mine. He succeeded. He went on to have many more successes, both personal and in career terms. From 2005 I had the opportunity and privilege of joining forces with him to build a company dedicated to helping people see the value of embracing appropriate forms of security to help their people and their enterprises flourish.

Along the way we have had thousands of debates and discussions, behind closed doors and on public platforms, in the media, through books and articles and comments, about a wide range of security topics. One of the ones that often surfaces is the way people, and societies, respond to imminent threats, and what methods they elect to try to turn a threat into something less threatening. It is a challenging area, and involves thousands of people, fine minds and skill-sets. There are noble responses and ignoble ones, pragmatic approaches and outrageous ones. In this book, we present cases for some noble and pragmatic ideas and actions. The source of much of the practical experience that is valid here comes from a man who is modest about his lack of professional qualifications in psychology or law, yet nevertheless brings decades of wisdom to us, through different qualifications and experience. These embrace Intelligence operations in both military and commercial contexts, and across a spectrum of a collective term we can call investigative interviewing, in another wide variety of scenarios, in collaboration with professionals in those and other fields. He combines this with approachability and objectivity, in both those military and corporate enterprise positions. Frequently cited as a current and continuing world figure in corporate security, as a thought leader and as a practitioner in the world of intelligence gathering, collation, analysis and interpretation, there are few with such a broad and deep pragmatic understanding of what makes a valuable difference in approaches to seeking out truths from lies and other forms of deception.

The man in question is David Burrill, a highly respected and accoladed figure, once again in both in military and business circles; a synopsis of his career can be seen at the end of this Introduction.

During our time together it emerged that David, mid-career, had been granted a sabbatical to write a thesis at King’s College London, on the challenging subject he summarized as ‘Prisoners, Intelligence and War’. It is an analytical work, thoroughly researched, and an engaging read. It is not merely academic, because it is full of personal experiences, not least the time when David was the Chief Military Intelligence Officer, on site, for the Falklands War. This was followed by three years in command of the military’s national interrogation organisation, during which he was responsible for conceiving and creating the Defence Debriefing Team. Other demands on work kept the finished and awarded thesis in a pending tray, for further consideration.

Looking around the world today, and at what states we are supposed to aspire to as role models, there are good things and disturbing things. The good things are often about scientific breakthroughs or new technologies, making life more fun, or easier, for many. Having said that, some might find it disturbing to note that a significant amount of money being poured into AI (Artificial Intelligence) projects is going into the development of robotic soldiers and weapons carriers. The bad things (the other ones) are more to do with selfish behaviour, like the endless drive to accrue fortunes at others’ expense, and the deterioration, or decline in what a reasonable person might call ‘moral values’. There is already in that last sentence a rich field for people to explore. What, for example, do we mean by ‘reasonable’ and by ‘values’? It is to questions such as these that we look at first. We will then have the opportunity to read the wise words and observations of this world leader in security, in his ground-breaking and never before seen thesis.

This book is as much about a war on words and images as a war on terrorism, a current headlining topic, or facing up to other threats.

The book falls into three unequal parts, summarised as:

Part One - which takes a look at the development of notions about morality and truth and offers a snapshot of what we see around us today.

Part Two - is the previously unpublished thesis on Prisoners, Intelligence & War.

Part Three - is some thoughts about where all this should lead a wise person today.

You can start straight away with any of these parts or continue a little longer with this introduction.

Truth, lies and morality are elementary ingredients in a volatile cake whose taste can vary from sweet to bitter and most points between. Epimenides’ paradox - the ‘old-time’ Cretan - that All Cretans are liars, throws up the notion that for thousands of years people have been grappling with conflicts about truth and lies. Although here we will refer further to certain philosophers’ and other thinkers’ observations, this is not overall an academic work. The point is to try to review the ways ideas on challenging concepts have shifted and are emerging, and then to compare them against the pragmatic insights and observations of a noteworthy figure who has grappled with them in challenging real-life, real-world scenarios for five decades. We will have the opportunity to consider what a man who is neither a dictator, a hopeless idealist, or a fantasist, thinks about truth, lies and morality, how these appear to a professional who has witnessed a vast range of mixes of, these elements: from rulers to foot-soldiers, the high-blown to the lowly, the innocent to the consciously criminal and murderous. There is perhaps an appeal from me towards the reintroduction of the idea of what feels right between adults as being a beacon of behaviour and judgement. I am immediately conscious of a temptation for others. They might say that with such an open-ended set of words, then the killing of others without reflection or regret feels right to many disaffected people around the world today. Yet I still believe we all owe each other more time and hard thinking to make the world a better place, as opposed to so many reaching for a can of human ‘Raid’ and, as it were, killing everyone dead.

So, Part One gets the theme going, thereby establishing the context for today’s debate.

Part Two opens and we then play the reel of a particularly momentous part in David Burrill’s life, when he had the opportunity to contextualise his own very real experiences with those of a wide range of other people who have worked for a long time in the art and craft of getting to know more about humans and their dealings with truth and lies. In some ways this world is like that of scientists who meet to compare their knowledge of things on the grandest scales: like cosmologists for example, and those finding ever more at the tiniest levels of workings, the quantum physicists and theorists. There is always more to be discovered about how people behave, and why.

David’s findings are sobering and simple. This makes them dangerous in the hands of denying ‘experts’ who are, behind their high-minded principles about ‘democracy’ or religious faith, searching either for ways of prolonging a state of being, or monetising the opportunities they see behind advocating the extension or introduction of amoral practices. David’s insights give the politically eloquent the verbal ammunition they need to dismiss them as naïve or unrealistic. The thing is, they say, there are intrinsically bad folks out there who don’t respect our values, and we need to exterminate them. Too many people in significant positions of power claim justification for behaviour they condemn in others as being animal-like, yet for which they pay others in their own society to practise on their collective behalf.

Children are often cruel experimenters, yet we watch socalled adults behaving outside any informed version of a moral compass. A seven-year-old might say, See, when I pull a spider’s legs off and shout at it to move, it goes deaf. Torturers and their patrons appear happy with this kind of pragmatic amoral reasoning.

David produces substantial evidence to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of many inappropriate approaches to acquiring information about events, capabilities and intentions. His experience is of course time-bound by virtue of his being human. His findings, however, extend well beyond this natural ideological constraint, and, thereby, persuaded and shaped by the morals and mores of his own time and perspective, to demonstrate that there are appropriate ways of enriching our understanding about emerging events, likely or unlikely, which transcend historical practice and shape a future response. Managing our uncertainty through the use of agonisingly painful procedures is both inefficient and inhuman.

In Part Three, after the honest and humane journey through David’s world of coming to terms with facts and fictions, we return to the current and emerging ‘moral landscape’. There will be those who wade in saying he has no demonstrable understanding of conflicts beyond the period of this published thesis. On the contrary, the thesis stands as a testament to preferred human behaviour outside of specific short-term time frames. It should also be noted that he is still a highly regarded and global authority on corporate security affairs in the world that contains all those post-thesis conflicts and wars, and still works passionately to help security and its practitioners embrace proven lessons and techniques. He is still on a mission: the pioneer’s pioneer. One day, hopefully, more of the world will catch on to what he has advocated and practised for half a century.

One of the greatest surprises for David in this writing enterprise was the receipt from me of the first draft of this book. He had no idea it was coming, other than my mention some long time ago that we ought to work to get his thesis’ ideas out to a wider audience. It was timed to arrive on his birthday (it did). He had never instigated the wider idea. He has been as delighted with what has emerged as much as I have been proud to deliver this justified tribute.

I have added my own small voice to the principles and practices we have developed and pursued in our time together. We welcome contributions to this major and key topic, both diverse and narrowcast. Truth telling and lies are an almost inherent part of what we are. It’s how we understand and respond to their elasticity that makes us worthy human beings.

www.burrillgreen.com

Part One

Can honourable truth-telling still exist?

Making a Start

In the olden days, i.e. like years in the century beginning with 19…, we began to be acquainted with emerging phrases like being economical with the truth. This was how Robert Armstrong informed Australia’s Supreme Court of New South Wales as to the duty of a senior civil servant to his Minister in the Spycatcher trial during November 1986. Lately we have become familiar with fake news and alternative facts. There will be other phrases along soon that will enjoy their brief notoriety in the spotlight, if, that is, there remain any uncontrolled media left to point them out. We appear to have millennia-long connections with words, phrases and lengthy statements about what is meant to be an absolute, a truth, but which so often turn out to be a relative, or slippery notions when people get their hands on them and their tongues or languages around them.

What should be a world of clarity turns out often to be a world of distorting mirrors, of twists and deceptions, of things reshaped to serve what are equally enshrined in cleverly assembled words to support allegedly noble ends but dissemble nevertheless.

It is often stated that we don’t begin to be recognized as developing from infancy until we learn to lie, for self-protection, or acquisition. We subsequently arrange our deceptions in hierarchies of acceptability, from white lies to blatant declarations. Thus the end justifies the means as in extolling the value of torture as a means to elicit alleged truths out of recently tied tongues or water-boarded mouths. Another example is the emergence of an aphorism accepted by many as embodying a moral truth: destroy an individual to save many more.

We will take a journey around this world and, like a respectable wildlife documentary, we will see what lies out there, and what often lies beneath. We can watch and look and learn and keep quiet voices as we commentate on what we observe, at least until the end of the program, when we can shout.

Perspective

Prejudice often stems from ignorance, yet when it is dressed up in its fineries, an ironic cloak labelled ‘truth’, it can be a far more dangerous and active player on the world’s stage. The clothes can take many form, from the loudly-coloured garb that might accompany the shouts and protests of bigots, to the sombre lab-coats and spectacles of self-appointed scientists who once preached about the ‘findings’ of their investigations conducted under labels like eugenics.

Xenophobia appears to be borne out of distance rather than proximity. We don’t seem to know about ‘foreigners’ so they must, perforce, be a) weird, and thereby, b), enemies. Then, when and if you get to know them it becomes worse, because your blindness and conditioning confirm those views in close-up. Quite how we demand certain benefits from globalization- yet simultaneously